May 04, 2025
It was my last night in Tokyo, and the rain felt personal.
Like it had something against me.
I'd wandered too far from my hotel and too close to the kind of ideas that get you killed, laid, deported, or published.
I found a bar. No name.
Just a hand-drawn fish on a chalkboard, looking like it had seen the end of the world and didn't care much for it.
Underneath, in chalk:
MIDNIGHT OLD STYLE BAR. SMOKING ALLOWED. OPEN ROUGHLY 9 TO 3.
Roughly. That was the only honest part.
I walked in.
It felt like I'd stepped into someone's imagination of an artsy bar—dim wood, old tobacco smell. A few stools, too close, and the kind of silence that doesn't mind watching you unravel.
The fuck, I said.
There was one guy at the bar already, sipping whiskey like it was a religion.
Beige jacket. Glasses. Looked like he'd translated himself from a quieter universe.
Didn't say a word when I sat next to him, just nodded like I'd passed some kind of sadness test—like he'd met my type once in a Tokyo basement, probably in chapter seven.
"Didn't think they let fiction into bars without a cover charge."
I said, as I lit a cigarette and asked for a Dark Rum.
He nodded again.
This guy was a professional nodder. Olympic level.
The bartender also didn't speak.
Just poured me a drink that tasted like bitter nostalgia and instant gratification and a punch all shaken hard. Like good rum is supposed to. Never too smooth but always satisfying.
"You write?" The fellow tippler finally asked, without looking.
"I drink, mostly. Writing's just a hobby at best, to pay for the drinking."
He smirked. "Same."
"You don't look like it."
"That's the trick."
I took a better look.
His face didn't give much away, but the words around him did. They hung in the air, invisible but well-placed. You could tell he was one of those types who writes about wells and cats and women who leave without slamming the door.
"You got a name?" I asked.
"Murakami."
"Jesus," I said. "You're real?"
"Tonight, I am," he said. "You?"
"Bukowski."
He blinked, like someone just told him gravity was optional.
"But you're—"
"Yeah. I get that a lot."
We drank in silence.
Chris Stapleton was playing on a jukebox that didn't exist.
A cat walked across the bar, then vanished into a crack in the wall. The bartender still hadn't spoken, but I was pretty sure he was judging me with his eyebrows.
Murakami lit a cigarette and passed me one. I don't smoke anymore. I took it anyway.
"You ever write something so real it felt fake?" I asked.
"I write fake things that end up real."
My turn to take a sip, and nod. And wonder if I should light this damn cigarette after 31 years.
We sat there, two ghosts in different fonts, trading sips and half-truths.
I told him about the time I got punched in the jaw by a librarian. He told me about a dream he had where Tokyo sank underwater, but the jazz bars kept playing.
We both nodded some more.
"I don't understand your books," I admitted.
"I don't write them to be understood."
"How artsy", I said.
He laughed, and it was the saddest thing I'd ever heard.
At 2:59 a.m., the bartender finally spoke.
"Time's up."
The bar started dissolving—slowly, like a memory fading in warm water. Murakami stood up, placed a coin on the bar that had no currency, and looked at me.
"This never happened," he said.
"None of it ever does," I replied.
He vanished into the rain. I sat there a while longer, sipping a drink that wasn't there, in a bar that might've been a metaphor, or a mistake, or just Tokyo being Tokyo.
When I stepped outside, the sign was gone. Just the fish remained, chalked onto the air.
The End
———
Oh, and he told me to tell you - never ask a writer if a story is fact or fiction or which parts
And
If this really happened.
🥃
